Drowned Wednesday(65)

‘Noses and tails?’

‘Yes. Rat noses and tails.’

Arthur winced as Longtayle’s right ear rotated and quivered in attention.

‘Uh, I don’t think —’ ‘No, no. Not real noses and tails. We’ll have to make some, and I shall imbue them with sorcerous intent as we go. Now let me see. We shall need a quantity of nice thin paper, a simple glue, some cardboard. Activated ink.’

As he spoke, the Doctor pulled all these things out of his coat pockets, along with a pair of scissors, several quills, a quill-sharpening knife, and an enamelled snuff box.

‘Are you familiar with the craft of layering paper and glue that when dry is quite solid and three-dimensional?’

‘You mean papier-mâché,’ said Arthur. He’d made masks for the end-of-year play at his old school. ‘I’ve done some.’

‘We shall make rat noses for you and Suzy out of glue and paper. I shall write on each layer of paper with Activated

Ink, impressing it with a spell of illusion and misdirection. This spell will build in strength with each layer, which when complete will create a fully fledged illusion that will cloak your body and present the appearance of a rat to anyone who looks at you. I estimate that to produce two such rat noses will take at least five hours.’

‘I think it’s going to be at least twelve hours before we even get to Drowned Wednesday,’ said Arthur. ‘So we’ve got plenty of time.’

‘We shall need it,’ said Scamandros. ‘For the rat noses will merely fool the eyes of the pirates — excepting Feverfew, as I previously mentioned. To present them with the sounds and smells of a rat, we shall need to work on another spell, which will be housed in tails. Tails that must be woven expressly for the purpose on looms created for that spell and that spell alone.’

‘Looms? Ain’t they great big wooden things with lots of threads in a frame?’ said Suzy. ‘Could be tricky to get one in here, even if you’ve got it tucked away in those pockets.’

‘Looms are not always large,’ said Scamandros. He reached into his coat and came out with two cotton reels, no more than three inches high and two inches in diameter. They each had four nails hammered into the top of them.

‘Allow me to introduce you to the wonders of the Arkruchill circle loom,’ said Doctor Scamandros.

‘That’s what you use for French knitting,’ said Arthur. ‘I know how to do that. Or I did know, once.’

‘French knitting?’ asked Scamandros. ‘I learned it as Arkruchillor circle-weaving. But doubtless, as with most good ideas, it came from your Earth and was transplanted to Arkruchillor by travellers from the House. You will need small hooks and the yarn.’

He handed over two small silver hook-ended needles and two balls of brown, fuzzy wool, then quickly explained how to run the wool through the cotton reel, arrange it around the nails, and start weaving or knitting, with the occasional use of the hook. After a few false starts, Arthur and Suzy quickly began to produce lengths of knitted wool.

Once they had the knack, Scamandros took the reels back.

‘I have to write the spell on them first, so you’ll need to start again,’ he explained. ‘In any case, we should do the noses first. They will take the most time, and will also need to dry.’

The next eight hours were taken up entirely in craft activity, interspersed with occasional breaks for tea or to look at something interesting in the crystal globe. Once they passed through a large sargasso of salvage, and all kinds of things bumped past the submarine. Long-lost possessions, treasured by their owners. Many of them were children’s toys, dimly seen stuffed animals and wooden figures, floating in the darkness of the sea.

Finally, the work was done. The rat noses looked like papier-mâché cones with paper whiskers. The rat tails looked like three-foot-long braids of brown wool. But if you looked closely, you could see the words of Scamandros’s spell moving about in the paper, or on the wool. Tiny letters marching around, joining up into words. Arthur couldn’t read them, but when he looked at them his mind was filled with images of rats. Normal rats, the kind he used to see occasionally slipping out of the gutter near the central railway station in his old home city.

‘Try them on,’ urged Scamandros. ‘But please remember, you must have both nose and tail on for the complete illusion, and if you only wear one of the two, there might be some imbalance in the spell.’

‘Like what?’ asked Suzy.

‘Suffice to say that if you put a nose on, put the tail on quickly thereafter,’ said Scamandros. ‘And vice versa.’